How to implement alternate and canonical tags

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When you have your mobile site ready, many a times, it is quite similar to the desktop pages. To avoid duplicity and confusion with search engines assuming that the mobile site is duplicate, we can use alternate and canonical tags.

Alternate tag is used on the desktop page (assuming that desktop version of the page is taken as the standard) and "canonical" tag is used on the mobile page. The canonical tag should reference to the desktop equivalent so that the link juice is attributed to the desktop page and there is no duplicate penalty.

How exactly you use the alternate tag:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://m.yourdomain.com/example-page" >


1.   Place a rel=alternate tag on each desktop page of your site for which you have a corresponding mobile page. Note that the tag should be placed in thesection of the page.
2.   Write out the actual rel=alternate tag as follows (shown below).
3.   Update the source page on your live web site and you're done!


How exactly you use the canonical tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/destination-page/" />

How do you Implement a Rel=Canonical Link?

  1.   Identify the page on which page you want to implement a rel=canonical, we'll call that the source page.
  2.  Identify the page which will be the target for your rel=canonical, we'll call that the destination page.
  3.  Write out the actual canonical tag as follows (shown below).
  4. Place the tag in thesection of the source page.
  5. Update the source page on your live web site.

Basically, canonical tag is put on the duplicate page (say mobile page and points to the origina page using href) and aternate tag is put on the original page and points to the duplicate page.

Check out this article:
https://www.stonetemple.com/category/digital-marketing-classroom/